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5 Ways To Personalize Your Beard

Over the past decade, beards have become increasingly popular among men of all ages. This should obviously not come as a surprise to any of you. Across the country, and the rest of the continent and hemisphere for that matter, men’s faces are getting hairier as corporate expectations continue to evolve towards more accepting and casual standards. However, as more and more men embrace their inner beardsman, onlookers have begun to assume the worst, people have started to assume that all beards are made the same.

From a distance, yes, some beards might appear similar, but just like a great oil painting or a delicious pizza, when you really look at multiple beards up close, you can see how different each and every beard truly is. Whether it’s the color, texture, length, or any other number of uniquely bearded attributes, every man’s beard is unique to the face that it’s attached to. Along with your beard’s natural characteristics though, there are a number of ways for a guy to personalize his beard to his unique tastes, each of which allows a beardsman to add a little bit of personality to his man mane.

Adjusting The Neckline

The neckline is a unique aspect of being bearded that every guy approaches differently. Some guys simply let their beards go as is and skip on carving out a neckline, while others obsess over the precision of it. There’s no exact science to finding the right style for you, but there are a few tips to keep in mind the next time you need to do some neck cleanup.

One of the mistakes guys make all the time is using their jaw line as the border for where to cut, which if that’s your thing than more power to you, but we firmly believe that your jaw line is way to high up to use as your cutline. Instead, just keep this in mind: your beard should be on your head, not your neck. Wherever you feel your jaw separates from your neck, use that as your cut line and you’ll be in great shape.

Shaving Your Cheeks

This one is a tale as old as time: to trim the cheeks or let them run wild? Well, for some beardsman, leaving their cheeks as is works just fine, as they have little to no hair creeping upward and over their cheekbones. For others though, trimming your cheeks is essential to making sure your eyebrows, sideburns, and cheek hair don’t slowly merge into a beard bordering on Teen Wolf-esque territory.

If you were to start trimming your cheeks, make sure you don’t go too low by staying in the area surrounding your cheekbones. Most likely your beard hair starts to thin out or lighten the further up it goes on your face, which means shaving your cheeks is more akin to trimming the lawn versus falling trees in a forest. If you happen to like a slightly more kept look, give it a try. Lucky for each of us, the hair will be back before you know it.

Choosing A Length

Once you’ve had your beard for a while, you’ll eventually happen upon a length that you like. This could happen a month in or six, but soon enough you’ll find yourself maintaining your beard at a specific length. For some guys this is a seasonal thing, opting to let their beards grow longer in the fall and winter and keeping a continually shorter beard during the spring and summer months as temperatures rise, but every beardsman has his own rhyme or reason for choosing a length.

What’s most important is that you find a length that feels good and makes you happy. Lucky for each of us, if you find that you don’t like the length you chose as much as you originally thought, give it a week or two and your beard will take on a completely different look. Beards are magical like that.

Choosing A Mustache Style

The Dali, the Fu Manchu, and the Handlebar, all great mustache styles in their own right, but not quite as feasible when they’re joined by a beard. Sure, you could go the mustache-free route á la Abraham Lincoln, but we tend to suggest against it. For the most part you have two options when it comes to styling your mustache: you can either trim your mustache to rest above your top lip or let your mustache grow out naturally and brush it to the sides using a comb and mustache wax.

You can also attempt to simply let it go as is, but be careful, the world wasn’t made for men with long mustaches. As always, do what feels best, but if you happen to be getting regularly intimate with someone, it might not hurt asking for their input in the matter. Yes, the mustache is part of your face, but when someone else is spending a lot of time interacting with your mustache as well, it’s best to have a conversation about it to make sure everyone’s enjoying themselves.

Let Your Beard Be

The least finicky option and the one requiring the least amount of routine maintenance is of course to simply let your beard grow out as is. This probably isn’t the best look for everyone, but if you’re embracing the beardsman lifestyle for simplification purposes than going all natural and unkempt is definitely the right approach. Obviously you can always make changes as your beard grows out, but when first starting off letting your entire beard grow out is an important step in understanding what makes your beard unique and how you can make the most of it moving forward.